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Number Seven

November is here, and along with November comes my usual collection of things that keep me off the bike. There were two good weekends at the start of the month, but, alas, the first one was eaten up by staffing the closing control for this year’s running of the Verboort Flat Tire Extravaganza! (volunteering to do this was, in retrospect, maybe not the most sensible decision I’ve ever made; I would have avoided collapsing into a suicidal depression if I’d instead just taken advantage of the weather and ridden down to Silver Falls that day) and the second one was spoiled by chest pains that certainly felt like a heart attack, but which just turned out to be stress-related chest pains (see my previous comments about suicidal depression; I dealt with the suicidal depression by not actually killing myself, but instead riding the fuck out of my bicycle – six 100k’s in seven days, or it would have been six if I’d not instead gone to the emergency room for EKGs, and a valium-assisted blood draw to look for heart attack proteins in my blood (I am extremely needle-phobic, and getting stoned on valium is about the only way to settle my head enough so that people can poke needles into me. And, goodness, it kind of hurt when the nurse was poking around in my arm trying to find a blood vessel that was not CLENCHED COMPLETELY SHUT from the residual terror about OHMYGODANEEDLEGETMEOUTOFHERENOW! One of the reasons I want to get a tattoo is that it involves having a needle ramming ink into my skin approximately 100,000 times in quick succession, and if I can do that without having my heart explode from terror the idea of single needle pokes will, hopefully, become less overwhelming.) And so, it’s been over a month since I’ve done a ride longer than about 80 miles (I’ve done, um, 12 60+ mile rides in that month; it would have been more if not for the heart scare and then it DUMPING down rain the week after that, with the exception of last saturday, which was merely drizzly but I couldn’t bring myself to get out the door at 8am.)

Well, I didn’t do more than 80 miles again today. Instead I rode the project bike up to Estacada on my Estacada 100 populaire for the seventh time. This time I wasn’t trying for a sub-4 finish, which was just as well because the weather forecast said there would be a 20mph SW wind and there was, which made the climb up Springwater Road even slower than it usually is.

I didn’t check the weather forecast for Estacada before I left (I checked Portland, which said showers and maybe a thunderstorm, and I checked the Cascades weather which said snow down to 4000 feet – not nearly low enough to get snow at Ripplebrook) and ended up being pleasantly surprised, after passing through a band of showers as I was transiting Gresham, by the clouds intermittently breaking up and giving me honest to g=d sunshine as I passed through Barton, crossed the Clackamas, and worked my way, against that annoying headwind, up Springwater Road to Milo McIver Park and the descent down to Estacada. The headwinds were, um, impressive; normally, when the project bike descends Amisigger Road I can get it up to 42-43mph depending on how aero I can make myself (the mlcm descends this ramp at about 45mph, but it doesn’t have a huge porteur bag in front) but today I only got up to about 35mph on the steepest sections, and the climb up Springwater, which I normally drop down to about 12mph by the time I reach the summit, saw my speed dropping below 10mph on more than one occasion.

And then, on the way back, I ran into what had become a line of thunderstorms just west of Barton; it had started to drizzle as I reached Baker’s Ferry Road, but by the time I’d climbed up out of the gorge the drizzle had become a light rain, which then, in quick succession became a moderate rain, then a heavy rain with a little bit of hail, and by the time I reached Carver I was soaked and my fingers and toes had become tiny cold sausages. My body was fine, thanks to two layers of wool jersey, but I was wearing fingerless gloves, which became sodden fingerless gloves, which became evaporative coolers as I chugged my way towards home, and my knee-high woolen socks had become wicks which carried water down into my shoes and around my toes, where it became, you guessed it, an matched pair of evaporative coolers.

This slowed me down a bit, which sort of spoiled the tailwinds I was enjoying on the way back from Estacada, and I ended up arriving back at home 4h22 after I left. I’ll have to wear shorter socks tomorrow (to keep the wicking effects down a bit) and HTFU about my lower legs being cold (and I’ll also tuck a couple of spare pairs of socks into the porteur bag, just in case.)

~11,250 miles for the year, 10991 RUSA km, and a few pictures.

—orc Tue Nov 20 20:04:34 2012

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